Swedes are living longer these days, so in order to get the same pension as our parents did, we now have to work much longer than they did.

Out of interest, what are those numbers? I believe they are 67 and 65 here for men and women respectively, IIRC. Dunno, it changes all the fucking time and it's not something I'll be a subject to any time soon so I'm not really following...

A while back the government wanted to increase the quality of the swedish shcools.

So they assessed all teacher education programmes at universities and revoked the examination rights for most of them. At the same time they set up a certification programme so that all teachers should certify that they have a proper education.

Now they need up to 10000 teachers to meet the current needs. By the year 2020 some sources argue that we will need 55000 new teachers.

Out of interest, what are those numbers? I believe they are 67 and 65 here for men and women respectively, IIRC. Dunno, it changes all the fucking time and it's not something I'll be a subject to any time soon so I'm not really following...

We get a forecast on our pension papers every year. Currently it is slightly more than 67 years for me and 69 years for my wife.

... which reminds me:

Women get lower pensions than men because they are expected to live longer.

There's a teacher at the local kindergarten that has been on sick-leave for a couple of years. Because she is employed and refuses to resign (why should she?), the county cannot hire anyone new to fill the vacancy. Instead they hire temps for up to six months at the time.

"We can't have monopolies", the state moaned. "We need to sell out our infrastructure companies!"

So now I pay two bills for my electricity. One to the company that delivers it to my house (which is still a monopoly since I can't change it), and one to the company that produces an amount of electricity equivalent to my consumption and pushes it out on the grid.

It should not be easier to open a bottle of liquor than a carton of milk.

You're in Sweden. Getting the bottle of liquor is harder than the carton of milk as there aren't nearly as many Systembolagets about as grocery stores.

Thanks for reminding me:

To limit the availability of liquor, Systembolaget used to not be open on saturdays. Their reasoning was that if you know you can go and buy more booze on saturday you may drink everything you have available already on friday night.

So people started taking some hours off on friday afternoons to buy liquor. To beat the queues thus formed, they started taking the whole afternoon off. While they were at it, they might as well do some shopping for the weekend.

End result: the swedish industry stood still on fridays due to lack of manpower.

Perhaps not purely politics: but if you plan to move to one of the bigger cities in sweden, and plan to rent an apartment, you better plan ~1-2 years ahead. If you sign up for the housing queue that early, you might be able to get an apartment in one of the run down places outside of the city within a month or five.

"We musn't own monopolies" cried the counties and sold out many of their retirement homes to private companies -- sometimes for as low as 1kr.

"This is better," the counties said, "because private companies are much better at being cost effective. This will lower the costs." And so they paid the companies per patient.

The companies indeed lowered the cost, and lined their pockets with the profit.

"Nonononono!" Cried the counties. "You must not turn too much of a profit. It will look bad for us if we pay tax money to your owners."

The companies, of course, said nothing.

Meanwhile, I am wondering what this magic is that the companies are able to do only if they own the retirement home, that a good consultant can't advice the county to do on their own -- without selling their assets.

Perhaps not purely politics: but if you plan to move to one of the bigger cities in sweden, and plan to rent an apartment, you better plan ~1-2 years ahead. If you sign up for the housing queue that early, you might be able to get an apartment in one of the run down places outside of the city within a month or five.

The average queue time is apparently approaching 5 years.

Back when I moved to this city, I bought a house. Partially because I prefer it. Partially because renting commercially requires your income to be 4-5 times the rent, and my salary wasn't high enough for that, and renting socially has a waiting list of around 10 years.

@blek As @Mikael_Svahnberg said, it's mostly the county-owned company (which is fairly large). Some of the larger private ones opt in to that system as well, even though they are not required to do so.

AFAIK the way it works is that they first check if you're eligible (sufficient salary, etc), and then amongst the eligible people, the one with the most accumulated queuing time gets first dibs. IMO it's a bit easy to apply for an apartment, you basically click on a button on a webpage saying that you're interested. The low effort of doing so probably contributes to the fact that it's not uncommon to see several hundred applications for a single apartment (the wepage helpfully lists the number of applications so far, and your position in the queue according to the accumulated days.).

@Mikael_Svahnberg Public sector organizations generally have a contingent of managers who measure their worth by budget. They combine with another contingent who believe in providing the best service at any cost, and there is literally no pressure to optimize.

Private sector, you still have middle management that measures their worth by budget size, but you also introduce senior management who is measured by the opposite and are empowered to overrule middle management. The service at any cost folks get slaughtered.

@PleegWat Yeah, buying apartments is also an option (I'm not the house kind of person, plus it's a bit overkill when you're living by yourself). It sucks, though, if you're not sure if you're going to stay for more than a year or two. Plus, decently located ones are seriously expensive.

@asdf I'm pretty sure the SOP for any privatization is: company comes in, makes drastic cuts to vital ongoing maintenance costs to maximize their short-term profits, lines their pockets with the profits for as long as they can, and then right about when the extended neglect starts to become a serious problem they hand it back to the government and say they're done with it and it's your problem again now.

Glass is heavy and breaks. This is especially important if you have young children.

It's still the best material for storing beverages, though. All kinds of plastic alter the taste of the beverage over time, and emit very small amounts of potentially harmful substances into the liquid.

Also, reusable plastic bottles are a great place for bacteria, while reusable glass bottles can easily be cleaned and don't have that problem.

When I was a kid, they still did the glass bottle delivery thing in my town. IIRC you would put your empties out on the porch or whatever and the milkman would pick them up when he delivered your new milk.

It's not much of a hassle, especially if you buy most of your beverages in crates. Just load the crate back into your car when its full and drop it off at the supermarket the next time you go shopping. It's also expensive not to bring crates back (you get around 6€ back per full crate).